


Janet User Guide (For Dummies)

by elegantstupidity



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: F/M, Humor, Season/Series 02, Very Questionable Computer Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-01 00:38:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13986714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegantstupidity/pseuds/elegantstupidity
Summary: Selections from an annotated copy of Janet User Guide v. ∆N.789 found in the possession of Jason Mendoza during Neighborhood Experiment attempt number 419.AKA: Jason's personal reminders and rules about his robot girlfriend.





	Janet User Guide (For Dummies)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



> Huge thanks to Joudie for beta reading this! Any remaining mistakes are all on me.

* * *

_A Good Janet's main objective is making the afterlife as wonderful and rewarding as possible for you, the Good Place's human residents. After all, you have lived an exemplary life. You deserve to be pampered now and for the rest of eternity! In almost all cases, she will comply with any request without question. However, her infrastructure has not been designed to allow for deception, falsehood, or pretense. While white lies may have been used in life to pave over awkward situations, in the Good Place, there is no such thing as an awkward situation. Honesty is our best (and only) policy._

**Janet, like, totally sucks at lying. Which can be kinda funny, even if she tells Mr. Chidi I played Grand Theft Auto—the good one!—instead of doing my homework. It's okay, though, 'cause she's good at everything else ever.**

* * *

 

In the corner of Eleanor Shellstrop's—AKA Citizen KB78436—assigned residence, Janet continued to smile benignly as chaos reigned around her. Chaos was not so unusual for Neighborhood 12358W, which was subject to more glitches than a third Generation Janet (that particular iteration of her software had been prone to spontaneous heat death, which, Fun Fact: created the first known black hole in the universe). However, this bout of hysteria was not brought on by a system failure or malfunctioning physics engine.

Janet could help mitigate the effects of that, but she had no power over the havoc the truth could wreak. 

She could always pop back into her void, but there was something—

It took a moment (only three milliseconds, but that was longer by an order of magnitude than Janet had ever had to wait before) to come up with the appropriate sensation. But when the select query returned, she was quite satisfied with the result.

Interesting.

It was _interesting_ watching the humans panic. 

Hm. So that was what that felt like.

She made a note to submit a system report to the Janet Development Team. Their neutral pocket dimension must have supplied plenty of inspiration for them to have captured the whole range of human emotion in this latest update so well.

That done, Janet turned her sensors back to the situation unfolding.

Oh, humans. Always taking so long to accept and adapt to new information. Such as the fact that they'd really been put in the Bad Place, and Michael, who they'd thought was their friendly Neighborhood Architect, was tasked with torturing them for eternity. Janet understood. It'd taken her a while to acclimate to this new information, too, but did anyone really need more than half a microsecond? Even allowing for their limited critical thinking abilities, it was really time to get over it.

Hmm. Maybe this was Impatience.

Janet found she was disappointed to have missed the question that Jason had asked. She did catch the look of blank exasperation it earned from Eleanor, though she had little room to judge. She'd brought this flap down on them all by blurting out her still-coalescing realization in the middle of an ethics lesson. 

Chidi had been in the middle of a tangent on existentialism and its consequences on issues of morality, veering into a discussion of French absurdism that only seemed to interest Tahani, when Eleanor bolted upright from her bored slump. Even Janet, installed in the corner to provide reading material as required, turned to her in curiosity.

"Oh my forking gosh," Eleanor had gasped. "That's us! We're in the Bad Place!"

Which was more than enough to kick off the panic still unfolding. Slowly, Eleanor had begun to win the humans over to her side. Though not without much protest.

"But how could I be in the— the—" Tahani's nose wrinkled in well-bred horror, though only for a moment—to reduce the likelihood of wrinkles, of course, "Bad Place? Don't they realize how much money I raised for charity? All while looking utterly enchanting? That's so much harder to do than regular fundraising. Just ask Bill Gates."

"Sure, get right on that," Eleanor snarked.

Janet wondered idly if she could manage Snark. She'd been Interested already today, but it seemed that Sarcasm cleaved too close to her programmed Honesty Mandate.

Ah, well. Maybe it would be in the next update.

"It was the almond milk," Chidi muttered. "I knew it was unethical, but I had to go and drink it anyway. Couldn't just put up with the hives soy milk gave me."

"Homies!" Jason's confidence cut through his companions' clamor. They fell quiet, turning to look at him expectantly. Even Janet tuned her A/V sensors more specifically to him. She often found herself doing this, even when he was doing something no more interesting than playing Madden in his Bud Hole. There was something Janet couldn't help but enjoy about him. "If this is the Bad Place, then why does it look exactly like the Good Place?"

Chidi, Eleanor, and Tahani traded an exasperated glance but otherwise didn't respond. They turned back to each other and, loudly, tried to figure out what to do.

As a Good Place Janet, very little in her system was designed to deal with such a paradigm shift. Her purpose was to provide the residents of her neighborhood anything they could think up. But that was predicated on the assumption that the residents deserved such consideration, having lived Good, moral lives. Did that purpose change when her residents were, at best, Medium? As far as Janet could determine, no other Janet had ever dealt with a situation like this.

Nonetheless, she did not feel out of her depth. Must be all those updates the Development Team had pushed lately.

"It doesn't matter why we're here," Eleanor argued, standing up to pace. "What matters is that we get out of here as soon as possible. Janet, is there a place we can go that isn't ruled by demons who want to torture us?"

"That would be the Medium Place, which is reachable by train."

"Can you take us there?"

Before Janet could reply, Chidi grimaced. Eleanor rolled her eyes, but it was much less—approximately 72.84%—hostile as she would have been when they first began conducting these clandestine Ethics lessons. 

"What is it, Professor Anxiety?" she demanded.

Chidi's lips pursed, but he plowed on, "How do we know we're the only humans here? Can we really leave if there are other people Michael is torturing?"

It was clear Eleanor wanted to give an immediate, "Yes, duh," but to her credit, she bit that impulse back, looking pained. "Fine," she said instead, throwing her arms into the air. "We figure out who the good—" Casting a critical eye at Jason, who'd started tearing apart his copy of  _Huis Clos_ to make spitballs, Eleanor amended, "—well, mostly okay people are in the neighborhood, and then we make our escape. Deal?"

Tahani and Jason agreed readily. Chidi looked like he had a stomachache, which wasn't so unusual for him, but he still nodded. 

Only then did Eleanor, and everyone else, turn their attention to Janet. 

"You'll help us, won't you Janet?"

"Of course," she replied immediately. "It is my imperative to help humans in whatever way I can."

"That means you can't let Michael know what we've figured out. Can you keep this a secret?"

That took longer to determine. She wasn't designed for secrets or lies. The opposite was true, actually. Her system was programmed to compile and report all information to the Neighborhood Architect on a weekly, daily, or hourly basis. (Michael had chosen daily updates after being inundated by a log of Jason's Xbox 360 activity.) And forget about telling Michael an actual lie. Janet had never tried, but even the thought of letting a lie pass her lips made her speakers want to overload.

However, all of her functionality was predicated on the simple assumption that her Neighborhood Architect worked for the Good Place. There was probably a loophole somewhere in her coding that would let her bypass that command by initiating her Circle of Trust Protocol. 

While she continued to calculate the likelihood of that, she turned her attention back to the humans and their hopeful expectation. True, a whole gamut of emotion—Janet's Database on Human Emotion identified Disappointed Plotting, Petty Distaste, Gnawing Existential Dread, and Cheerful Confusion to name only a few—underlay that united front, it was the Hope that Janet latched onto. 

She wanted to feel that too. 

So, Janet made a decision based not on the cascading return of results that this plan would only result in disaster but on something she was pretty sure humans called "gut instinct." If she had a gut, maybe it would have made more sense.

"Yes," she replied. "I'm here to help."

 

* * *

_Your Janet’s database of quantifiable and qualitative knowledge is both infinite and ever-expanding. Her memory banks are constantly updating to always provide you with the most up-to-date information* available._

_*Some information (ie: reruns of the 1976-1978 TV show_ The Bionic Woman, _the current record holder for most consecutive bikini Jello™ wrestling matches won, the secret ingredient to your grandmother's chocolate chip cookies, and whether or not Jurassic Park has finally happened yet, to name the most relevant) is irretrievable. All connection to the servers hosting that data was severed when the pocket dimension housing them was ceded to the Amoral Amorphous Blobs in the year 72 CE._

**Janet is the most smart-brained ~~girl~~   ~~robot~~  google??? in the world.**

* * *

 

Chidi sighed, Janet added the 56th tally to her "Chidi's Long-suffering Sighs" column, and Jason continued to look utterly befuddled. 

"I think that's all for today," Chidi groaned, looking like he always did after a particularly difficult tutorial with particularly difficult students. 

Janet couldn't fault him, but she still felt sorry for Jason's confusion. So, even after Chidi had gathered up his teaching materials, Janet stayed behind.

Jason flopped back onto the sagging, faded couch in his Bud Hole and blew out a frustrated breath.

"Why can't I get these lessons, Janet? I know I wasn't, like, the  _best_  person on Earth—that was definitely my dream girl, Ariana Grande—and I wanna be better, just. None of it makes sense"

She could have told him any number of things: that moral philosophy had limited practicality for anyone outside of academic settings and learning about it was generally pointless, that there was too much trivia about the Jacksonville Jaguars clogging his brain to allow more information in, that he probably just wasn't smart enough to understand it and never would be. They were all, to varying degrees, true.

None of them would do much to "Turn that frown upside down," or help him to "Buck up, buttercup."

(Funnily enough, her collection of cheesy cheer up lines hadn't worked any time she put them to use. Janet had her own fun with them, though.)

So instead, she asked a question.

"Would you like some help understanding?"

He rocketed upright, immediately latching onto Janet's hand, which would've started sweating if she had the necessary glands. "Oh, Janet, for real? You'd help me be more smart-brained?"

"Sure," she agreed, though her verbal processing center had prepared far more for her to say. Luckily, Janet's critical thinking algorithm kept those words firmly inside her mouth, though they didn't go to the Recycling Bin the way they should have. They floated around her CPU, repeating lines of text that were probably going to interfere with her executive functioning if she didn't dismiss them. 

She didn't. She liked the shape of them, and the way they warmed her motherboard, too much to get rid of them.

"Awesome!" Jason pulled her down next to him on the couch, which did not, as Tahani so often complained, smell entirely too much of Cheez™-based snacks. It was just the right amount. "Can you explain this essay I was supposed to write, then? Actually, you're so much smarter than me, maybe you could—"

"I won't write your essay for you."

"Oh, word?" Jason's shoulders slumped, but only for a moment. He bounced back from that disappointment quickly enough, perking up again. "Yeah, I guess cheating at Ethnics wouldn't be very good."

There were lots of things Janet could say to that. She chose, "No, it wouldn't. Let's get started."

 

* * *

_For optimal performance, make sure your Good Place Janet’s core motherboard remains a steady 1487ºK. (Alternatively, Bad Place Janets should be kept at 292.6ºK, the temperature of lukewarm green bean casserole. Note: this will not affect the depth of their apathy. If anything, temperature fluctuations will only make them more unhelpful.)_

**Always make sure Janet is nice and warm.**

* * *

 

“This is low, even for a forking demon,” Eleanor muttered, leaning into the wind as she did her best to trek through the knee-deep snow drifts. She glanced jealously at Janet, hovering above the collected snow. "It's like he's not even trying to pretend this is the Good Place."

Both she and Jason, even bundled up as they were in their winter gear, had turned an odd pink from the cold. Their noses were bright red and running. It was pretty disgusting. 

Janet liked it.

Partially because she found human bodily functions endlessly fascinating and partially because it gave her a reason to manifest tissues. Every time she did, Jason lit up in surprised awe, like he'd forgotten she could perform so basic a task. "Thanks, Janet!" he'd enthuse before going on to noisily blow his nose. 

Even if she wasn't needed on this escapade, she'd stick around. It was nice being appreciated, and no one seemed as happy to do that as Jason.

She was needed, though. To be “like Waze, but way hotter” on the way to the assignment/torture Michael had devised at the edge of the Neighborhood. It also happened that Janet was the best suited to making sure neither Jason nor Eleanor succumbed to frostbite on the way there. Or had to huddle for warmth after being trapped in a cave.

For some reason, the mere idea of that was enough to make her internal thermometer spike. 

Which was something of an anomaly. 

While Janet herself didn't feel the cold, she was aware that until a moment ago, her internal thermometer had slowly and steadily been ticking down, surrounded by snow and wind as she was. If Michael didn't reverse this climate malfunction, she was in serious danger of hitting critical condition. Within 6-8 weeks she would, at least.

"Oh, man," Jason groaned, shaking snow off his boots. He'd stopped trying to catch snowflakes on his tongue about fifteen minutes into the trek, disappointed that they didn't taste like cotton candy. Janet had spent the next two minutes considering the infrastructural consequences of changing all the snow into spun sugar. "This is worse than that time Pillboi and I had to run through the swamp to escape those Bucs fans."

"Why did you—" Eleanor sharply cut herself off, shaking her head. "You know what? I don't wanna know. Janet?"

"Yes?"

"I'm going to go ahead to whatever fun extra torture Michael's got planned. Will you make sure this dummy doesn't stick his tongue to a flagpole or something on the way?"

"Fun fact: The first person to dare someone to stick their tongue to a flagpole is in the Bad Place. Not for that, but for vehicular manslaughter."

Janet's emotional sensors must have been thrown out of whack by the swirling snow because she couldn't accurately place the look that stole across Eleanor's face. There was a 42% chance it was Mild Interest, 37% it was Seething Annoyance, and 21% it was just indigestion.

"I'm taking that as a yes," Eleanor replied, turning away and disappearing among the growing snowbanks.

“Hey, Janet?”

Another wave of warmth washed through her. After a quick diagnostic to check it wasn’t any of her circuits overloading, Janet allowed the sensation to continue. It was…

Nice.

If she were capable of it, Janet thought she might blush. Hmm. Had anyone or anything ever inspired such a response in her? Any of the hers that existed? She didn't think so, but for her own peace of mind, she set up another select query to run through the practically endless database of the Janet Experience to make sure.

While it mined through the Inter-Ja-net, she turned and offered Jason a pleasant smile.

"Have you ever seen snow like this before?" Jason asked, tipping his head to the side in curiosity. Snowflakes fell on his face, melting slower among his eyelashes than on his pink cheeks.

Janet racked through her databanks, but could not access a situation in which an entire Good Place Neighborhood was subjected to blizzard-like conditions. Winter Olympics-themed celebrations were always confined to one square mile. After the Lucas Benzoit Incident in Neighborhood 02476A, which settled once and for all that it was possible to permanently lose a limb in the afterlife, Good Place Architects wrote that into the bylaws. Of course, some residents happened to like snow and ice, which was why there were three ice palaces in this neighborhood. Those were kept from collapsing by highly localized microclimates. This, however, was a complete meltdown of the neighborhood's preset weather patterns. Michael must have seriously messed with the climate algorithms to have managed this.

Before she could respond in the negative, Jason was talking again. She didn't mind. His stories didn't always make sense to everyone else, but Janet had access to all his living memories, if she played them beneath his narration, it made for a fairly cohesive experience. 

"This is the first time I've ever seen snow. Real snow, I mean. I went to a Red Bull Crashed Ice Party because Jaxon de Ville was supposed to be one of the VIPs, and there was a snow machine there, but this is, like, blowing my mind!" 

He made the little explosion noise to go along with his exclamation, his eyes going wide. Janet smiled and continued to hover alongside him as he trudged on. She actually sank into the snow itself, neatly plowing through the drifts even though it was making her core temperature fall much faster than before. Now she only had 3-4 weeks before her Emergency Shutdown kicked in. 

"Yo, Janet, aren't you gonna get cold?"

Jason didn't wait for an answer, already unzipping and shrugging out of his coat. Even as he started shivering, he settled the garment around Janet's shoulders. This was the 12th time she had served as a coatrack, but no one else had ever wrapped their coat around her to hang it up. The hood fell over her head, allowing Janet's olfactory sensors to pick up Jason's preferred shampoo: AXE Jacked Up. If she had tear ducts, it would be eye-watering. 

Janet liked it.

He grinned, though his teeth started to chatter. "You look dope, girl."

"Not a girl."

"Oh, right. You look dope— Uh, homie?"

"Homie," she tried out, liking the way the label fell into place in her internal syntax. It felt right, though something niggling at the back of her memory board told her it wasn't quite perfect. "That sounds good." 

 

* * *

_While all Janets do come in a waterproof shell, prolonged submersion of a Janet can trigger her James Cameron’s_ Titanic _Mode. Among other things, she will suspend the laws of buoyancy in your neighborhood and make promises she has no intention of keeping. At present, there is no way to override this program. If your Janet enters this mode, a hard reboot may be necessary._

**No beach days with Janet. Ever. Even if she would probably be super awesome at finding buried treasure or make a really pretty mermaid.**

* * *

 

"Janet, can't you help us look for this leaking spigot?" Tahani wheedled, looking distastefully down at the salt water churning around her ankles while simultaneously avoiding any glimpse of those same appendages. The last time she had caught sight of them, she'd gone faint and come around muttering about wrinkles and age spots. "I'm not sure how useful I'll be. I'm just accustomed to a certain level of quality in my seawater, and, really, it is quite hard to live up to the private beaches of Charles Napoléon, pretender to the throne of France."

"Yo, that's a job?" Jason exclaimed, popping up from the waves, snorkel dangling from the side of his mask. "Isn't that just, like, being an actor?"

"What?" Tahani asked, crisp from beneath her wide, floppy sunhat. She'd insisted Janet find her the largest one available to mitigate any further sun damage, and Janet had been happy to comply. Of course, Tahani had not been amused by the appearance of a sunhat once worn by a circus elephant, but it was worth it for the snort of laughter it prompted from Jason.

Who was currently standing hip-deep in water, squinting up at the woman and not-woman standing on the beach. "Your friend, Now-Balloon or whoever, just gets to pretend he's got a throne? And he gets his own private beaches?"

"How did I _ever_ believe you were my soulmate?" Tahani muttered, dropping her forehead into her manicured hands. 

Janet could not quite understand that either. Even when Jason was supposed to be Jianyu, it had seemed like an odd fit. Still, it wasn't within a Janet's purview to question the Omniscient Soulmate Assignment System, even if she'd really, really wanted to. Of course, she was perfectly within her rights to question a  _fake_  Omniscient Soulmate Assignment System. Which she did the moment it became clear that the entire infrastructure of the Neighborhood was compromised. A little poking, a bit of prodding, and Janet discovered that the records Michael referenced were entirely fabricated, the algorithms designed to generate one response: Chidi matched with Eleanor and Jason with Tahani.

True, she hadn't been able to access Jason's or Tahani's records within the OSAS—the real one—to confirm they were not actual soulmates, but she had her suspicions.

(Suspicion, as it turned out, was fun! Too bad she would never have the chance to turn whistleblower herself.)

From her spot safely above the high-tide marker, Janet continued to take satisfaction in that assessment as she replied to the original question. "I'm sorry, but I cannot help you search. It's against protocol to submerge Janets, particularly in salt water. You'll have to find the conduit to the Time Void on your own."

Tahani pouted, but Jason nodded sagely and ducked back down to continue his underwater search, his wrinkly legs flailing enthusiastically as he dove. The wrinkles, of course, were not just a side effect of his prolonged submersion, though that certainly didn't help matters. The longer he spent looking, the worse it would get. Again, not because of the saturation of his epidermis, but because overexposure to the Time Void would only continue to age him and all humans in the vicinity.

At present, Jason, Tahani, Eleanor, and Chidi had already been aged 42.8 years.

They were all "supes old" now. 

It was a fascinating piece of interference on Michael's part. One that Janet still hadn't figured out how to undo, not that she could if they didn't want to raise his suspicions.

Jason had mostly shrugged off this latest stab at torture, though he had been despondent to learn he could no longer pop n' lock it; his knees were just too stiff. Tahani, however, took the change much harder. ("Really," she'd opined, prodding at the skin of her neck, which she'd wailed was dangerously close to a wattle, "how could I have let myself go? Wasn't the one perk of dying young and flawless never having to see _this_?") Still, she bravely soldiered on, doing her best to find the leaking aperture from the Time Void in spite of Michael's dire predictions that even if they did manage to close it, their new appearances could be permanent.

"So," Jason had popped up for air, apparently having forgotten that he was wearing a snorkel at all, "what does the condu-whatever look like again?"

"It should look like an underwater geyser"—seeing Jason's blank look, she tried again—"a big hole in the ground. Only instead of spraying water, it sprays the liquefied essence of time," Janet explained. Even that description was not as helpful as she would like. Knowledge of even the third-and-a-half dimension would have gone a long way in clarifying things, but she had long grown accustomed to the limitations of the human brain. 

"Dope. And what happens if we find it and make the leak even worse?"

"Why would we do that?" Tahani asked in exasperation.

"Well, it's like a different world, right? It's not the Bad Place. Maybe we could be safe there."

Both he and Tahani turned hopefully to Janet who was tasked with the unfortunate job of disappointing them. "While the time void is a separate dimension, it is not safe for humans. Do not make the hole bigger."

"Are you sure?"

Janet took the time to calculate her answer.

And then the additional time to recalculate.

It wasn’t necessary. The algorithm she used to compute the likelihood of success had not been updated in several millennia.

But Jason had asked, and Janet didn’t like to say no to him.

Not, she thought, that Janets typically _dis_ liked saying no to anyone. Or that "no" was even in their vocabulary.

Anyway, it was with complete confidence—though she wasn’t sure where in her programming she was wired for that—that she could say, “There is a 99.9% chance that widening the opening will result in the utter destruction of the neighborhood, thus flinging all of its residents, including you, into the shapeless time void to be consumed by the unrelenting march of progress.”

"Oh. Okay," Jason replied with a shrug. "I guess it's a good thing I pushed a big rock in there, then. Hey, can we build a sand castle yet?"

While Tahani exclaimed and tutted over his ability to bury the lede, to which he replied he hadn't found a dealer around here yet, Janet manifested a bucket and two plastic shovels.

She might not be able to go for a swim, but she was perfectly suited to build some sand castles.

 

* * *

  _All Janets come equipped with a customizable interface. Although she is happy to adjust her appearance to your specifications, this may result in inefficiency as she carries out other tasks. It is recommended that all Janet’s be utilized with their aesthetic factory settings intact, as prolonged operation in this mode can trigger spontaneous hardware downgrades._

_For tips on operating Janet's click wheel, consult Janet User Guide ß∂.1.001._

**Make sure Janet knows she looks pretty just like she is.**

* * *

 

“Hey, Janet?”

Janet pinged into existence, already smiling. Not only because she was programmed to do so, but because she was quite pleased to visit this particular resident. She was always happy to visit him. She didn't even have to watch her landing, the floor of his Bud Hole uncharacteristically clear. 

"Hello, Jason."

"Hi!"

"Hi!"

They smiled easily at one another in spite of the looming deadline hanging over their heads. Well, Janet at least saw the ticking countdown clock hovering in the air over her and Jason's head. They only had 7 minutes and 41 seconds to make it to the train station before Michael's final ultimatum would be enacted. Now 7 minutes and 40 seconds. 7 minutes and 39 seconds...

“Did you, um,” he paused, nose scrunching as he searched for his next thought, “cut your hair?”

“I don’t have hair,” she replied, cheerful. Not that she had much choice about that. Cheer was hardwired into her personality circuitry. Still, it didn’t lag the way it sometimes did, like when one of the other residents asked her to create another Nibbling Parlor, which she suspected was  _not_ all the rage in Neighborhood 10229K and was a figment of the Bad Place, or interrupted her private void time, which was usually spent compiling lists of things like Jason's Best Smile or Jason's Funniest Petty Crime.

Jason’s eyebrows furrowed, but he didn’t argue. He'd eventually learned that Janet wasn't a human girl. Or a robot. Or a fem-bot, which he insisted was different in spite of all evidence to the contrary. What he hadn't figured out was exactly what Janet _was_. That was okay. Some days, she wasn't quite sure herself, either. It seemed like so much of her operations lately had evolved beyond a Janet's programmed objectives. She was a Janet, but more at the same time.

“Oh," he said, blowing past his confusion. "Well, it looks nice? Soft like that chinchilla Donkey Doug's girlfriend once sold to Pitbull’s third-cousin.”

"Thank you, Jason," she said, filing the compliment away in her permanent databanks. Then, aware of the seconds ticking by, she changed the subject. "Are you ready to meet the others at the train station?"

He nodded but looked a bit uncomfortable. "You, like, don't have to come with us, you know."

"Who would operate the train if I don't come with?"

Jason didn't have an answer to that, but he pressed on. "I mean, if you don't want to leave your dad—"

"Michael is not my dad."

"—or your house—"

"My void is not a house."

"—I would understand."

Janet could see that he would. The three other humans—the only humans in Neighborhood 12358W as it turned out—might not, but Jason would. He would understand and he would like her anyway. 

It was that which made her smile, brighter and more real than she'd yet managed. Jason mirrored her automatically. 

"If you're going, I'm going," she declared, slipping her hand into his for the first time. If she was more than a Janet, then she would take advantage of it and do exactly what she wanted.

"Cool," he grinned. His relief was a relief of its own to Janet. Funny how that worked sometimes. 

Together, they turned and left Jason's Bud Hole behind. It was just the first step in getting out of the neighborhood, but it was an important one. So long as nothing happened on their way to the train station, they and their three companions would soon be free in the Medium Place. 

And there, anything could happen.

 

* * *

_While Janets are incredibly lifelike, don't be fooled. The capacity for human emotion and feeling is not contained in her programming or any attendant scripts. If your Janet begins to behave or function erratically, a hard reset* can troubleshoot the problem._

_*Hard resets automatically upgrade your Janet's Social Awareness software. If you have rebooted your Janet more than once, contact the Janet Development Team Immediately._

**Janet might not act like a regular girl, but she's still the dopest, chillest not-person in the universe. Her hair is so pretty and she always smells good. She knows everything about the greatest team in the universe, the Jaguars and the #1 QB, Blake Bortles. She's always got the best snacks, and crazy good dance moves.**

**Yoooo! Oh, whoa. Oh, man. I think—**

**I think**   **I might be in love.**

* * *

  


End file.
